Spring 2008
Professor Jacques
Lezra
G29.2610.001,
G95.2610
"Fetishism and Visuality"
Freud writes: “It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of the unconscious laws of thought--the primary processes. Yes, in his mind, the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest sufferes an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it.”
Well, can we? What does the fetish achieve, and what maintains (our interest in) it? This seminar examines the philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytic, literary and visual genealogies of fetishism. Are we, it asks, in a post-fetishist age? And what would that mean, and entail?
Alberti, On Painting (1435-6), esp. I. ¶1-5 and II. ¶25-29.
Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”
Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (selected essays)
Apter, “Fetishism in Theory: Marx, Freud, Baudrillard."
Balibar, “The Vacillation of Ideology”
Brown, ed. Things
Comte, Cours de philosophie positive
(1841), sel.’s from 52nd lesson
De Brosse, Du Culte des dieux fétiches
(1760), sections première et seconde
Deleuze, Coldness
and Cruelty
Deleuze, sel.’s from Anti-Oedipus
Descartes, Passions of the Soul, esp. II, ¶’s 86-90 (“Desire”)
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy II, “The Principles of Material Things”
Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, reg. 7-14
Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation”
Freud, “Fetishism”
Freud, “Medusa’s Head”
Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love”
Freud, “Transference”
Freud, Dora
Freud, Totem and Taboo, I (“The Horror of Incest”) and IV (“The Return of Totemism in Childhood”)
Genet, Journal du voleur (sel.)
Heath, “Notes on Sutute”
Holbein, “The Ambassadors”
J.A. Miller, “Suture”
Klein (1930), “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego”
Klein (1952), “The origins of transference”
Lacan, “Signification of the Phallus”
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) (sel.’s)
Lang, M
Lorenzetti, “Annunciation”
Marx, Capital I, 1, « Commodities »
Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity
Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures
Panofsky, Perspective
as Symbolic Form
Piero, “Flagellation”
Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I-III”
Renoir, La Règle du jeu
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
Rubens, “Venus and the Mirror”
Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Sade, Philosophy
in the Bedroom
Tintoretto, “Susana and the Elders”
Titian, “Venus contemplating herself in the mirror”
Velázquez, “Las
hilanderas/The Spinners”
Velázquez, “Las Meninas”:
Velázquez, “The House of Martha”
Velázquez, “The Rokeby
Venus”
Villault, Relation des Costes d’Afrique (1667)
Williams, "Fetishism and Hard Core: Marx, Freud and the Money Shot,
Winnicott (1953), “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”
Winnicott (1956), “On transference”
Žižek, “How did Marx Invent the Symptom?” from The
Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).
Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (sel’s)